Roxana

by Daniel Defoe

  ROXANA

  DANIEL DEFOE was born in 1660 at St Giles, Cripplegate, the son of James Foe, a tallow-chandler. He changed his name to Defoe from c. 1695. He was educated for the Presbyterian Ministry at Morton’s Academy for Dissenters at Newington Green, but in 1682 he abandoned this plan and became a hosiery merchant in Cornhill. After serving briefly as a soldier in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion, he became well established as a merchant and travelled widely. Between 1697 and 1701 he served as a secret agent for William III in England and Scotland, and between 1703 and 1714 for Harley and other ministers. During the latter period he also, single-handedly, produced the Review, a pro-government newspaper. A prolific and versatile writer, he produced some 500 books on a wide variety of topics including politics, geography, crime, religion, economics, marriage, psychology and superstition, and in his writing he often adopted a pseudonym or another personality for rhetorical impact. His first extant political tract (against James II) was published in 1688, and his bestselling satirical poem, The True-Born Englishman, appeared in 1701. Two years later he was arrested for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters, an ironical satire on High Church extremism, committed to Newgate and pilloried. He turned to fiction relatively late in life and in 1719 published his great imaginative work, Robinson Crusoe. This was followed in 1722 by Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague year and, in 1724, by his last novel, Roxana. All of these novels are published in Penguin Classics. His other works include A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain, a guide-book in three volumes (1724–6; abridged Penguin edition, 1965), The Complete English Tradesman (1726), Augusta Triumphans (1728), A Plan of the English Commerce (1728) and The Complete English Gentleman (not published until 1890). He died on 24 April 1731. Defoe had a great influence on the development of the English novel and many consider him to be the first true novelist.

  DAVID BLEWETT is Professor of English at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, and the Editor of Eighteenth-Century Fiction. He is the author of Defoe’s Art of Fiction and The Illustration of ‘Robinson Crusoe’: 1719–1920, and has edited several eighteenth-century novels for Penguin.

  The famous ROXANA.

  Facsimile of frontispiece to first edition

  DANIEL DEFOE

  ROXANA

  THE FORTUNATE MISTRESS

  or, a History of the Life and Vast Variety of Fortunes of Mademoiselle de Beleau, Afterwards call’d The Countess de Wintselsheim, in Germany.

  Being the Person known by the Name of the Lady Roxana in the Time of King Charles II.

  EDITED BY

  DAVID BLEWETT

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

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  First published 1724

  Published in the Penguin English Library 1982

  Reprinted in Penguin Classics 1987

  21

  Introduction and Notes copyright © David Blewett, 1982

  All rights reserved

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject

  to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,

  re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s

  prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in

  which it is published and without a similar condition including this

  condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

  EISBN: 978–0–141–90536–5

  In memory of my father

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  A Note on the Text

  A Chronology of Daniel Defoe

  Select Bibliography of Critical Studies

  ROXANA

  The Preface

  The Fortunate Mistress

  Notes

  Map of Roxana’s London

  Introduction

  Roxana (1724), Defoe’s strange last novel, is among his most fascinating works. Unlike his other novels, which without exception end with the triumph of the protagonist, Roxana is the story of the moral deterioration and ultimate defeat of the heroine. But what makes it unusual among Defoe’s novels and important to the subsequent development of English fiction is Defoe’s focus upon the interior drama of Roxana’s moral decay, the psychological turmoil of a woman who wilfully chooses the glamorous but immoral life of a courtesan over the honourable but duller life of a married woman. The result of her decision, as she slowly comes to realize, is that she sacrifices personal integrity for worldly opportunity and in doing so is caught in a web of circumstances from which she struggles in vain to escape. Formally, Defoe’s other works of fiction are comedies. Roxana is his only tragedy.

  Defoe turned to fiction when he was fifty-nine years old and at the height of his power and his reputation as a writer. Essentially he was a journalist – for nine years he single-handedly wrote the Review, a newspaper that appeared as often as thrice weekly – with a strong interest in politics that in his later years grew into a concern with larger questions of social order and family responsibility. But Defoe could, and did, write on anything – politics, history, geography, religion, economics, sex, marriage, psychology, magic, superstition – often employing a pseudonym and adopting another personality for rhetorical effect or as protective covering. His love of role-playing and disguise was an essential part of his personality, so that he took an evident relish in his skilful impersonations when he worked as a government spy for Robert Harley, the Lord Treasurer. It is not perhaps surprising that Defoe eventually began to write novels, or that he wrote them in the form of fictitious autobiographies, playing a wide variety of roles to do so. What is surprising is how vividly he realizes those imaginary lives – so much so that one of them, Robinson Crusoe, the original desert island hero, has become one of our cultural myths, like Faustus or Don Juan. Defoe lives the parts of his heroes and heroines, revealing their fears and desires, their selfish scheming as well as their capacity for sympathy and generosity. His achievement as a novelist, however, was not an inspired accident, but the result of years of practice as a professional writer which taught him how to develop and sustain a fictitious personality, to construct a story full of drama, and to deploy the words and images that would give force to his moral themes and life to his creation.

  Like all true novelists, Defoe creates a fictional world. His protagonists inhabit a moral universe that defines their actions and gives meaning to the pattern of their lives, compelling us beyond pleasurable observation into moral assessment. The work of scholars like G. A. Starr and Paul Hunter has shown us how much Defoe owed in his earlier novels, particularly Robinson Crusoe, to the form of the Puritan spiritual autobiography in shaping his own fictional structures. We judge the actions of Robinson Crusoe or of Moll Flanders, as they do themselves, against a moral backdrop that throws the pattern of their lives into relief. The same thing may be said of Roxana, except that the pattern of spiritual autobiography has all but disappeared and the moral vision rests, not on the old seventeenth-century Puritan values, but on a more familiar world
where individual needs and desires clash with social forces that demand compromise and threaten personal integrity. More than in any earlier novel, Defoe explores the way in which vanity and worldly ambition can destroy inner peace and normal human affection for others. Roxana is not nearly so emotionally self-sufficient as his earlier protagonists so often appear to be, and in his final novel Defoe pays unusual attention to personal relationships, especially the friendship of Roxana with her servant-companion, Amy, and the fatal estrangement of Roxana and her daughter, Susan. In his analysis of Roxana’s growing despair and the social circumstances in which she and the other main characters are trapped, we sense the growing theme of retribution. In no other novel by Defoe is the presence of the past so fateful and so insistent.

  1

  The development and final shape of the novel is controlled by Roxana’s choice between two paths in life: initially, virtuous poverty or sinful prosperity, then later, a respectable marriage or the glamorous but immoral life of a whore. Throughout the novel Roxana is torn between these alternatives, fatally tempted by wealth and flattery while yearning for respectability, until the emotional tug-of-war and its ruinous consequences help to destroy her life. The contrast between these two modes of existence is at once reinforced and enlarged by two major parallels, one spatial and the other temporal.

  Defoe employs the geography of London – specifically, the opposition between the aristocratic and dissolute West End where the King and the court live, and ‘the City’ in the East End of London, the home of prosperous and respectable tradesmen, bankers, and shopkeepers – to underline the contrast between two poles of Roxana’s existence. In her highly successful life as a courtesan Roxana is provided with luxurious apartments in a house in Pall Mall where she gives lavish parties attended by the very highest levels of society. It is here that she wears her brilliant, if immodest, Turkish dress, and performs her celebrated ‘Turkish’ dance. When she gives up her high life as a courtesan and goes to live quietly in the City, the change suggests the symbolic as well as the geographical distance. Always a creature of disguises, Roxana now adopts Quaker dress, a severe, plain, and old-fashioned costume, as different from her gorgeous clothes in court circles as anything possibly could be. But even though she eventually marries the honest Dutch merchant and buries her past, Roxana retains and occasionally puts on her Turkish costume, the memento of her former life and, to Susan, proof of her identity as the Lady Roxana. Living respectably in the City, Roxana is pursued and finally ruined by her former life at the other end of town.

  The contrast between the West End and the City, between exciting, aristocratic vice and dull, middle-class morality, is repeated at the international level by the contrast between France and Holland. Throughout Defoe’s life, that is, during the Restoration and the early eighteenth century, France, though generally feared and hated by Englishmen, extensively affected English taste, particularly in clothing styles, music, and the theatre. At the same time, as the leading Roman Catholic power and the home of the deposed Stuarts, James II and his son, the Old Pretender, France under Louis XIV represented the greatest possible threat to English national security and values. Holland, although a commercial rival, was a political ally and the home of William of Orange, and as a somewhat dull but Protestant power it appeared the antithesis of everything French. The fact that on the Continent Roxana’s two affairs are with a prince living in France (and employed by Louis XIV in secret diplomatic negotiations) and then with a respectable Dutch merchant, who sincerely offers to marry her, should be understood with an awareness of the social and political overtones. Roxana’s obstinate immorality is not merely sexual. In her preference for the French aristocrat over the bourgeois Dutchman, Roxana extends her crime by preferring a way of life that is the very opposite of everything Defoe considered desirable. The tragic ending of the novel springs directly from Roxana’s earlier moral choices. Married at last to the Dutch merchant, Roxana’s security is threatened by the evidence of the Turkish dress, associated with her glamorous, aristocratic, and immoral life, and with the prince in whose company she acquired it. Like the contrast of the West End with the City, the contrast of France and aristocratic values with Holland and middle-class values underscores Roxana’s choices in life and emphasizes her errors.

  In a similar, though rather more complex, way the novel’s double time-scheme draws attention to the moral decline of the age of George I. Ostensibly the novel is set in the reign of Charles II, as the title-page and a number of allusions in the novel suggest. Roxana, for example, employs as her financial adviser Sir Robert Clayton, who rose to prominence in the reign of Charles II and died in 1707, and she bears a resemblance to Nell Gwynn, Charles’s mistress, who once memorably, like Roxana, referred to herself as a ‘Protestant Whore’ (p. 105). Above all Defoe evokes the atmosphere of the Restoration court with its balls and masquerades and pretty actresses who caught the eyes of men of quality and were asked to court.

  But in the novel’s opening pages Roxana tells us that she was almost ten years old in 1683 when she was brought to England by her parents. Born in 1673, Roxana would have been twelve in the year of Charles II’s death, and it is clear from many other references to time in the novel1 that when Roxana is living in London, giving fashionable masquerade parties, and eventually becoming the mistress of the King, that the time is just after 1715, and the court that of George I. Of course Defoe is satirizing the age in which he was living by drawing a moral comparison between the reign of George I and the reign of Charles II. Several times elsewhere in his writings Defoe contrasts the ‘vile debauch’d Taste of King Charles the Second’s Reign’2 with the moral probity of the courts of King William, one of Defoe’s heroes, and of Queen Anne. Then shortly after the arrival of George I in England, as it seemed to Defoe, many of the morally deplorable practices of Charles II’s time were revived. Both the King and the Prince of Wales kept mistresses, the theatres flourished, the extravagant new Italian opera came into vogue, and above all, the masquerades were revived and given royal support.

  It is hard now to understand the opposition the masquerades aroused, but with the opportunity they provided (since everyone was disguised) for the indiscriminate mixing of social classes in public and semi-public places, and the sexual licence that was consequently thought to ensue, the masquerades were seen by moral reformers as both symptom and cause of a national moral decline.3 By setting his novel in the reigns of George I and Charles II at the same time, and by placing Roxana in the heart of fashionable West End court life with its gambling parties and masquerades and by making her the King’s mistress, Defoe suggests that Roxana’s story of moral decay goes beyond the individual to include, and condemn, the world she inhabits.

  2

  The two modes of existence of Roxana’s life – ‘The opposite Circumstances of a Wife and a Whore’ as she neatly puts it – are the subject of the lengthy debate at the heart of the moral comment of the novel. When she rejects the Dutch merchant’s attractive offer of marriage, Roxana argues that a woman of independent means has nothing to gain and everything to lose in marriage. She loses her freedom, becomes an ‘Upper-Servant’ or housekeeper in her own family, and gives up her fortune to the control of her husband. Roxana correctly understands the legal status of women in her day. An unmarried woman who had come of age enjoyed essentially the same legal rights as a man, that is, the right to own and dispose of property, to make contracts, and to enter into litigation. When she married, however, she lost these rights, since at law she became one person with her husband, in whom the legal existence of the couple was solely vested. Like a number of outspoken feminists of her day,4 Roxana argues ‘That the very Nature of the Marriage-Contract was, in short, nothing but giving up Liberty, Estate, Authority, and every-thing, to the Man, and the Woman was indeed, a meer Woman ever after, that is to say, a Slave’ (p. 187).

  Our sympathy for Roxana is aroused not only by the force and skill of her argument, but also by the melancholy cir
cumstances of her early life. At the age of fifteen Roxana became the victim of a disastrous marriage arranged for her by her father when she was still sufficiently impressionable to be captivated by her husband’s good looks and dancing ability. But she then watches helplessly as her fool of a husband squanders his own money and her dowry, until finally he leaves her, penniless and with five children on her hands. Elsewhere in his writings5 Defoe inveighs against ‘prudential’ marriages (arranged for financial reasons, often without adequate time for consideration by the marriage partners) – he calls such matches ‘matrimonial whoredom’ – and there is little doubt that we are meant to see Roxana as a woman whose negative opinions about marriage are initially determined by circumstances over which she has little control. As a beautiful and engaging young woman, however, she is not long in discovering that, by becoming the mistress of her landlord, a wealthy jeweller, she can live far better than ever she had as a married woman, and her subsequent rise to spectacular riches confirms her notions about the advantages of a mistress over those of a wife. Morally the transition from one mode of existence to the other is reprehensible, as Roxana is painfully aware, but the ease of the transition and the extenuating circumstances of her first marriage permit a considerable degree of sympathy with the heroine. When, by the middle of the novel, Roxana argues her case for ‘the Dignity of Female Liberty’ (p. 269), it is against a background of marital wretchedness and subsequent happiness (albeit broken occasionally by bouts of guilty conscience) that does much to explain the vehemence of her argument and helps us to understand it. Defoe, with his usual capacity for presenting an argument forcibly even when he disagrees with it, makes as strong a case for Roxana’s position as he can.